Gygax 75: The Map Around the Dungeon (Week 2)

In principle, this is to set up the area around the dungeon that is to be the campaign start point. In our particular run through of the exercise, first we must choose a world. We decided to go with a site on world 3 - tropical air world and have it be part of the great tree bank. This is a huge, floating forest, canopy towards the sun, roots pointed outsystem in the air disc-world. We are running with an 'early phase sphere' theme so we are going to see how far we can get with just insects, plants and funghi on our starting world; no reptiles, dinosaurs, mammals yet. Insects dominate life here.

I searched up and printed off a hex-grid and together with the in-house testing team marked out where the elements identified in the challenge guide needed to be. This is the working version, the full-colour fancy version is below.

This is a place of difficult terrain - a labyrinth of broad tree branches that interconnect indirectly and lead to lots of switch-backing on a journey from place to place or courageous leaps or aerial steeds. The hex-scales are 1 mile but travel times will be longer but a given hex will also be 'deeper' with more stuff per hex being theoretically possible. Things could also be closer together than crow-flies distance might allow since direct paths may not be possible.

Returning to the orthodoxy of the challenge, we need to set out sites on the map along the lines of primary settlement, relic, and so on. After an evenings brain-storming we came up with the following:
1. Dragonfly Platonic city state - uplifted dragonflies rule over their primitive fellows in something that has ambitions to be Babylon or Ur. This is their first attempt at a major settlement. Built around the fact that all the natives can fly, this is their Tower of Babel.
2. 'The Thicket' - huge multi-hex thicket of invasive plant species centered on the air genasi's original Spelljammer ship, the edges are patrolled / pruned back by genasi rangers as they try to hold back this slow ecological apocalypes. Full of hostile, predatory plants. At the heart of the thicket, in the old settlement, is the priceless treasure of the first Spelljammer dockyards and workshops, with a half-dozen ships that were unable to fly when the settlement fell.
3. Air Grenasi capital - a chaotic temporary-become-permanent settlement from when they abandoned their original landing to the Thicket. Also the most advanced settlement on the planet, with what wanderers and traders as pass through the system congregating here. This will be the 'home city' detailed in Week 4.
4. Dragonfly missions - handful of uplifts trying to raise up their fellows. These are effectively combination of schools and apprentice workshops for practical learning, mostly staffed with teachers from the air-genasi, sometimes other races or previously educated dragonflies themselves.
5. Myconid village - ancient natives, they remember before the dragonflyfolk gained sentience, before even the time of the boring-beetles. They are waiting for everyone to go away again.
6. Wreck of a spelljammer - a crashed elven imperial naval vessel, once the pride of the in-system fleet, now a carefully harvested resource to keep what ramshackle ships remain in-system aloft.
7. Giant bones of a space beast, home to both dangerous scavengers and unusual and useful materials. Equivalent to a whale-fall event, it acts as a magnet for all the local carnivores.
8. Asteroid - a rare source of metals on this world, jealously guarded by the boring beetle-folk, source of their metal weapon supremacy.
9. Cursed artefact covered in space barnacles, lodged in a branch (a giant-sized mattock, hurled from Forge by a raging giant, slingshotted around sun and flung out-system to come to rest here)
10. Abandoned boring-beetle warren - our primary dungeon, explored next week. Lair to a spider-vampire who has hoarded all the magical manuals and knowledge from the Thicket and the Elven Spelljammer wreck.

We marked up a map on blank hex-paper then I worked up a version with Hex Kit

Another element of the challenge for this week, which I found much easier than doing the map, is to set up an encounter table.

Encounter table (2d6):
2. Rootgnaw wurm
3. Myconids
4. Gall-airship drawn by dragonflys - local equivalent of an raiding galley.
5. Boring-beetle raiders
6. Nomad dragonfly folk
7. Shambling mounds
8. Giant moth
9. Giant stag beetle
10. Genasi herb harvester
11. Giant predatory caterpillar
12. Thicket sporeball (explosive)

This was one of the easier weeks, good prompts and a nice clear purpose made is a straight-forward evenings work.